It's been a while since I blogged and I can tell you now that the last year has been a bit of a roller coaster.
My life has basically been thrown in the air and totally changed in various different ways. But like the proverbial phoenix I have been trying to rise from the ashes and rebuild myself.
Through all of this I have made some discoveries and realisations about myself and in particular my mental health.
Basically I had a break down the middle of last year and effectively broke. This resulted in me reassessing every aspect of my life. I left a great but stressful job which had been a huge part of my life for three years. I ended up in counselling and on anti depressants. As far as I was concerned at the time, my life was over. I have learnt however that this is very far from the case and that it was merely a life lesson to grow from.
I discovered that I had in fact suffered from Anxiety and Depression for a number of years but as is the case with most of us, especially men, we just get on with it and bury it down deep. Stiff upper lip and all that. The problem with that is eventually it rears its ugly head and results in exactly what happened to me, which I wouldn't wish upon anyone.
During this period of reassessment and reflection I realised that my priorities had been all wrong and that I need to do the things I want to do with my life. Namely The Clumsy Pickle! I have missed being my own boss and running my own life over the last 3 years and feel like I need to get back on this and get things back in order for my own sanity. I dipped my toe back into the water during the Christmas period and sold way more than I expected, which is brilliant and proves that I do actually have a viable business here if I devote myself to it properly.
Ever the nerd I've kind of adopted the Mentat Mantra from Dune as help to get through all this. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion couldn't be more appropriate really.
My aim from now on is to work on my own mental health and hopefully share any knowledge I gain from this with the hope that it might help somebody else out there.
Hi everyone I thought I'd give you all a little update on whats going on here in the pickle jar.
Crazy times are ahead because I only have a week left at my current job before I leave to become freelance again. I'm sure some of you will think it's a bit of a hair brained idea and why would I give up a perfectly good job, believe me I've been having all these thoughts myself.
So why do it then I hear you ask. Well good question. As you may know I used to do this several years ago but as is always the way life likes to throw stuff in the way which meant I had to stop. As much as I loved my subsequent job however and it was a god job, it wasn't the same. There was always something gnawing at the back of my brain telling me I had unfinished business, projects that needed to be made real. In itself this was enough to make me think about how to start up again but on top of this I had my first major dealings with mental health. Obviously I've been aware of people having mental health issues for a long time and I guess deep down I knew there was something inside me too, but like a lot of people and especially men I buried it down deep and put on the stiff upper lip us Brits are famed for. In hind sight this wasn't such a great idea.
I realised that anxiety and depression were very real and that my life was causing me to get worse by the day. I was working all the time which caused relationships to break down and limited the amount of time I could spend with my daughter. So after having a little bit of a breakdown my mindset changed. I needed to be in charge of my own destiny, captain of my own ship. This invariably led me to the decision to resurrect the Pickle and do exactly that. I'm not naive by any stretch of the imagination so I realise that these next few months/years are going to be incredibly hard but at least it won't be a Christmas in retail. If you've never experienced it it's hard work believe me.
So there we go in a nutshell, that's why I'm going freelance again. My plan now is to illustrate like I've never illustrated before, and to blog my journey through this. I'll be blogging about my passion for the artwork I'm producing, the trials and tribulations of going freelance and also how important mental health is on a day to day basis, and yes it is fine to admit that you have problems, It's the first step to getting yourself better.
